By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest Karrion Kross and Scarlett
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
On the day the contract expired
Scarlett: “I’d say we knew for months what was happening, what was going to happen. I hope it’s okay for me to say this, but I’m kind of his Game of Thrones’ Red Woman. I have been for a long time when it comes to astrology and looking things up, and a lot of the stuff I do on the paranormal show is a bit real with the tarot cards. So I did see that we were going to have some sort of contract dispute, but it was going to take a while. And I did feel in my gut like we’re going to step away since like, February.”
Karrion Kross: “I mean, we’ve told very few people about that, but yeah.”
Whether Kross was trying to make things work at that point
Kross: “Always trying to make things work, always trying to make the best of anything and everything, right?”
Scarlett: “You approached Hunter back in January, actually letting him know that you want to stay.”
Kross: “And you. I said we would both like to stay.”
On Scarlett’s contract negotiations:
Scarlett: “So, after you talked to the representative of talent relations about your contract, one of the last questions before the 24-hour notice was given, Kevin asked where I stood in all these contract negotiations. And they said, ‘We’ll get to her once we’re done with you,’ which I took as them using me as leverage against him. I do feel like if he agreed within the 24 hours that they would have offered me something, would it have been the same amount as it was before? Would it have been less? I don’t know. But all in all, it felt like a massive, massive red flag, and I did feel like it did come off a bit misogynistic, because originally I was hired before you, and the idea that I have no value without him, and it’s only determined by whether or not he signs, that came off as very misogynistic to me.”
Kross: “I told you this a long time ago, but didn’t really ever publicly talk about this. When I signed to go from NXT to Raw, somebody said the exact same thing to me over the phone. I asked her, I said, ‘What do you think?’ At that time we had no reason to ever think it would be strange or go sideways, so I signed it, being told we’ll get to her after we get to you. I go up to Raw, then we go into like Mad Max and the ThunderDome, and she’s at home. So I was like, well, I’m not gonna do that again. We already saw exactly what happened with that.”
Scarlett: “I was clear to manage, but not wrestle. So at any point, I could have come up and done exactly what we did on NXT, but they said they wanted to separate us and wanted me to wrestle once I was clear after the breast augmentation that popped during that dark match. But then I was cleared, and it was a few days later that they actually fired both of us.”
Kross: “She was at TakeOver when I wrestled Joe to drop the belt, she was ready to manage, and they told her, ‘Don’t go out.’ We’re just like, what’s going on here? I was like, can we address this publicly? And they were like, ‘No, don’t talk about it.’ I was like, This is bizarre.”
On his viral promo after WrestleMania
Kross: “So we do that. Everybody loved it. We leave. The next day was weird at Raw. So aside from everything that I’ve talked about, so we don’t talk about it again, I get a phone call from somebody in talent relations, and he says, ‘Creative is not happy. There’s heat. They’re pissed.’ I was like, Well, I apologize about that. Let me go take care of that right now. I have a great relationship with them. They’re right across the hall. He’s like uh, I said, ‘No, no, dude, this is my fault. Let me take care of it. No problem.’ I go across the hall. I speak to some of the writers, explain everything. They’re like, ‘We have no idea what you’re talking about. We haven’t talked to that guy in two weeks.’ Some of them didn’t even see it. So I was like, What’s going on here? So walk around the building and just looking at everything, everyone’s saying, Hello, everything feels fine. I call him back, no answer. The next day, no answer. I think it was like the third day he finally picked up. He’s like, ‘Yeah, I shouldn’t have said it that way. I apologize, it was actually Hunter.’ And I was like, man. ‘So since we spoke, have you talked to Hunter and explained everything to him that I explained to you?’ He’s like, ‘No.’ And I was like, so you’re letting our boss just sit there and fume for how many days now? You could have just told me this on Monday. He was down the hall. Could go talk to him and just explain all this. This is like a misunderstanding. So I eventually did speak with Hunter and cleared the air with him, you know, it’s a massive company with a lot of different departments, and not all of them are in lockstep with communication. He was super cool about it once we spoke to him, he understood where I was coming from and what I was trying to do. It wasn’t like a live thing. It was on YouTube. But just weird.”
On what’s next for them:
Kross: “To be honest, everything we’ve been doing has been really enjoyable. I’ll speak for me personally, having the freedom to assess the audience, where we’re at on the show, where we’re out on the card, who I’m working with, what everyone else is going to be doing on the show, and how to diversify what we’re going to do on the tail end of it, and be able to bring that to life and hear the reactions and feel that. I mean, I love being in WWE, but being able to actually perform my artistry in the way that I know people want to see it, and being able to hear that and feel that back, nothing beats that. Nothing beats that. I want to do more of that. I want to go back to the places that I was performing. I’m interested in going to new places. I’m very content with the schedule that we’ve been building and what we’re doing, going to the conventions, being able to meet fans, aligning that with the book tour, man, it’s been awesome. Being able to meet people, especially the New England area, people coming from Providence, that’s where things really took off with the ‘We want Kross’ stuff. There’s people driving from all over the northeast to meet us in these different places, in these cities, and they all have their story about where they were when that took off. Being able to hear that people getting tattoos of our characters on them.”
Scarlett: “People naming their babies after us. I know that sounds insane, but people have come up saying, Hey, this is ‘Scarlett Karrion.’ And there’s been another Scarlett.”
Kross: “Just being able to show up anywhere, at any time and do anything, and creating an air of unpredictability at these shows, I think also serves something very interesting to fans as well.”
It seems as if they believe she brought something to the table. I really liked his character, look, etc.